Calum's Road Read online

  It was the beginning of a lifelong preoccupation. After leaving Torran, D. A. Maclean taught at three different schools in Skye. In 1972 he retired to a house in Ellishadder in the parish of Staffin on the north-eastern coast of Skye. There, Donald Archie

  Maclean improved his equipment and noted and compiled monthly weather reports, which began to appear in the local press as ‘Staffin Weather’, and would in 1981 be anthologised in booklet form as Weather in North Skye, and which won him both local fame and a global network of interested correspondents.

  When he was monitoring ‘Staffin Weather’, Maclean came very close to recording the weather of Arnish in northern Raasay. The two communities are divided by just seven miles of sea. They face each other across the Sound of Raasay. They share far more than divides them: a heritage, a language, a seafaring and fishing tradition, an attachment to the surnames Gillies and MacLeod . . . and the weather. What snow falls on Staffin will almost always fall on Arnish. The storms that blast Ellishadder will progress within minutes to Torran. Their inches of rainfall and hours of sunlight are almost the same. The teacher whose acquaintanceship Calum MacLeod had made in the late 1930s unwittingly devoted much of the rest of his life to a journal of the weather conditions in which Calum worked on his croft, at his postal round, on his lighthouse boat and upon his road.

  Calum himself had a kindly view of the microclimate in northern Raasay. Others, lacking his warm familiarity, would be less charitable. The climate of all of Raasay, including the north of Raasay, is characteristically wet and windy – although possibly its chief characteristic is that it has no single characteristic, as the climate of the Hebrides is notoriously variable and unpredictable. In January 1962, 11.41 inches of rain fell on Staffin. And a similar amount fell also upon northern Raasay. But exactly one year later, in January 1963, the local precipitation had fallen by 90 per cent to 1.41 inches. In the whole of the year 1967, while he was laying road foundations somewhere south of the shores of Loch Arnish, a total of over 100 inches of rain was deposited on the head of Calum MacLeod. The average annual rainfall for the United Kingdom is between 20 and 40 inches.

  There was never much frost on these shores, where the Gulf Stream breathed its last, and what snow came down did not usually lie for long. But snow certainly did fall, and at curious times of the year. On 9 May 1943 D. A. Maclean noted 4 inches of snow lying in northern Skye, ‘with tulips in full bloom and the cuckoo cheerfully (or crazily) singing from the cliffs’.

  Winter temperatures were however comparatively mild, and summer temperatures comparatively lukewarm. The average January temperature in central England is roughly 3.8 degrees centigrade. In Skye and Raasay it is 6.5 degrees. The average English July temperature is 16.1 degrees. In Skye and Raasay it is 15.4. The maximum summer temperature over any prolonged period of time on or near the Inner Hebridean seaboard is usually no more than about 21 degrees. In Edinburgh it is 24 degrees, and in Birmingham it is 27 degrees. Skye and Raasay routinely share around 1,200 hours of sunshine a year, compared with Edinburgh’s 1,384 and Birmingham’s 1,404. Calum MacLeod might not have frozen at his labours, but he was equally unlikely to bake. During May, June and July, the months of longest daylight, the mean daily duration of sunshine is five hours in the islands of northern Scotland, compared to eight hours in the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England. During the months of shortest daylight – November, December and January – there is an average of an hour’s sunshine a day in northern Scotland, compared to two hours a day on the south coast of England.

  Yet there would be no dependable meteorological routine. During the summer of 1968, while Calum MacLeod was working on the central spine of his road between Brochel and Arnish, the weather beamed upon him. Skye and Raasay enjoyed almost 1,500 hours of sunshine in that climatic annus mirabilis, including ten consecutive August days with an average temperature of 19 degrees.

  Calum MacLeod would try not to work in the worst of the rain. But one thing would always haunt the man outdoors in Raasay: sheltered in the lee of Skye or not, he could never quite escape the wind. The wind was, and still is, the dominant weather feature. Occasionally, but only occasionally, it took the form of a welcome south-westerly zephyr. More frequently it blew cold breezes into the hottest day. The wind created horizontal hailstorms. The wind drove drizzling rain through the most carefully fitted layers of clothing. The wind alone could make it difficult even for Calum MacLeod to keep his feet.

  The United Kingdom is the windiest country in Europe, and the Hebrides are comfortably the windiest part of the UK. A ‘day of gale’ is defined by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office as a day on which the mean wind speed at ten metres above ground level reaches thirty-nine miles per hour or more over any period of ten minutes during the twenty-four hours between midnight and midnight. In England the most exposed coasts are those of Devon and Cornwall, where there are about fifteen days of gale a year. Inland, towards Birmingham, London and even Edinburgh, the number of days of gale-force winds decreases to fewer than five a year. The Hebrides experience, on average, about thirty-five days of gale a year. Between 1964 and 1968 Donald Maclean, Calum MacLeod’s acquaintance and erstwhile neighbour across the water in Ellishadder, recorded an average of sixty-eight days – or almost 20 per cent of the time – in each passing year when the wind blew between Staffin and northern Raasay at a speed greater than thirty miles per hour.

  Yet even the wind would rarely stop Calum working. He worked, as all of his people had always worked, through the worst and the best of weather. He worked hunched up against the storm, bent by the gale, chilled by the cold, sweating in the unaccustomed sun, soaked by unpredicted showers of sleet – sometimes all on the same day. The weather would never defeat him. The weather would change and go elsewhere. Calum MacLeod would not.

  If Calum was indefatigable, the same could not be said of his tools. He was, on one occasion, levering a large rock out of the hillside over his road. His crowbar took purchase of it and the boulder began to move. It rolled out of the hollow in which it had stood since the Jurassic Age, tumbled down the slope, struck the road, bounced once and landed on top of his wheelbarrow, spatchcocking it to the ground. In total Calum worked his way through three wheelbarrows, six picks, six shovels, five sledgehammers, four spades and one crowbar while building the road between Brochel Castle and Arnish. It was estimated that the largest single boulder he removed weighed nine tons. It stood in the path of his road. He used a jack to lift it, then packed it in place with stones, then jacked it up again, then repacked it with stones, then jacked it once more . . . until it had been heaved out of his way and had fallen, defeated, into the sea. He was accompanied on his painstaking travail between Brochel Castle and Arnish by a tiny portable storage hut which edged its way, yard by yard, month by month, year by year, along the verge in line with Calum’s progress.

  Having animals to milk and feed, and other crofting chores to complete, Calum MacLeod could not spend all of every working day on the road. His early attempts to keep track of the hours through modern timekeeping devices failed, as one wrist- or pocketwatch after another was smashed during his heavy manual labour. So he resorted to a basic portable sundial. This was no more than a stick put upright into the ground. ‘It was surprisingly accurate’, said his daughter. ‘He would return home with a half-hour margin of error. And it fascinated his grandchildren!’

  Calum MacLeod’s hours were restricted not only by his lighthouse shifts and his crofting work, but also by the fact that he was a deeply religious man. Like most other Raasay people, he was a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland and a committed Sabbatarian. He observed family worship twice a day, and any house guests or visitors were expected to participate. He was precentor, leading the singing of Gaelic psalmody, at the church services held in Fladda School. He would do nothing but essential or humanitarian work between midnight on Saturday and midnight on Sunday, and his road could in the strictest sense be described neither as essenti
al nor as humanitarian. ‘Of course the Sabbath was sacrosanct’, said his daughter. ‘And I think that did help, because my father worked very hard for six days, and on the other day he would deal with the animals, see that the cows, the dog, and the cats were fed and watered and whatever – and then, if he was not attending church services, it was his day. He would read a bit, or lie on the bed and read some more, and he usually had a snooze in the afternoon. There was this unwinding and recharging of batteries, and I felt that really kept things going. He didn’t burn out.’

  His faith revived him. It gave him strength and fortitude. It also informed the way that Calum MacLeod viewed the world outside Arnish. He personally lived a long way from the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s and early ’70s, but he was made aware of it, and had come to perceive the moral decline of British society as interconnected with six years of socialist government, centralisation, and the apparently wilful persecution of such communities as northern Raasay. In September 1970 a typically idiosyncratic volume of reading material caused him to write another letter to the Stornoway Gazette.

  ‘Before me’, he wrote in his careful, cursive, educated hand, ‘lies the “History of Ancient Egypt”, published 1809. Formerly described as the “granary of the Ancient World” and “the cradle of arts and sciences”, Egypt was “flourishing, polite and learned, whilst Europe was immersed in grossest ignorance and barbarism. Once the most learned and flourishing society on earth, yet Egypt was reduced to the lowest state of degradation where the usual bonds of society seem as if eternally separated” . . .

  ‘There is reference to allegations of transactions with crocodiles. I fully believe that were these reptiles common to our riverbanks, Socialists in their apathy to crime or evils would not ban this abomination, but would gladly seize the opportunity to licence and tax as harmless amusement . . . were the Socialists conforming to the law of God when they passed the Abortion, Capital Punishment and Homosexual Bills?’*

  Calum MacLeod was the very definition of an autodidact, a self-taught polymath. He learned both academically, from reading often arcane volumes, and empirically, from a life spent outside at sea and on dry land. By the end of the 1960s there was clearly nobody else available who knew more about the past and present, the botany and geology of northern Raasay. When such an august body as the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) held a field meeting in Raasay in 1969 he was their obvious point of contact, and he did not disappoint them. ‘Arnish and Torran’, read the BSBI Journal report in the following year, ‘turned out to contain more woodland than anywhere apart from Raasay House – mainly birch and hazel, with Hymenophyllum wilsonii on the mossy boulders. With the assistance of Mr Malcolm MacLeod we located Lythrum salicaria – difficult to find when only 4 in. high!’

  ‘Oh, plantlife!’ Calum would say to Derek Cooper four years later. ‘Well, there’s even wild strawberries. I was with botanists, and we found 531 different species in the area, of plants. Some were known in Britain. In fact we got one or two, and they said that they could be only found in the limestone rocks in Kent.’*

  There would come a time when not only botanists but also journalists, radio presenters and television crews made the pilgrimage to Calum MacLeod’s front door. But Derek Cooper was the first to recognise that something extraordinary was happening in the north end of Raasay. An energetic and productive broadcaster and writer, Cooper’s maternal family came from Skye and Lewis. He had spent school holidays in Portree and had ever since been in thrall to the Hebrides.

  Cooper walked up to Arnish in 1972 and tape-recorded an interview with Calum for the BBC Radio Four programme It Takes All Sorts. ‘The voice of a fully authentic crofter,’ reported the Daily Telegraph at the end of May, ‘one of the few still living on the Hebridean island of Raasay, was heard in conversation with Derek Cooper in It Takes All Sorts on Thursday.

  ‘Calum MacLeod cheerfully makes a living there and is building a road to his land single-handed. Aged 58 or so, he had “never been in the hands of a doctor, a dentist or a nurse”. He told Mr Cooper: “It’s a fine, healthy life here. No dirty air and no chance of being run down by a car.”

  ‘He was a great find for radio: a farmer of high intelligence and with a gift of self-expression in English far from difficult to Sassenach ears; it was not surprising to learn that this refreshingly unambitious man had turned in at least one prize-winning essay.’

  Derek Cooper returned to Arnish on a wet summer’s day in 1973 with a BBC television film crew to make a thirty-minute documentary entitled The Island That Nearly Made It for the BBC’s ‘Breathing Space’ slot. Cooper followed the current postman, John Ferguson, from the south end of the island to Brochel, where Ferguson prudently parked the red post office Morris Minor van and walked up the rough surface of Calum’s highway.

  ‘A few months ago’, Cooper commented in a voice as gravelly as the road, ‘this [telegraph] line came down in a gale. The only link with Arnish in the north. Calum MacLeod, who lives there, was cut off. Well, nothing new in that. He’s been cut off all his life. The public road ends at Brochel Castle. Boswell and Johnson walked up here 200 years ago, following this same trek. From now on [Brochel] you have to go by foot.

  ‘For generations the people who lived up in Arnish carried everything in and out on their backs. And you still do it today. Fifty years ago the hundred or so people living in the north of Raasay petitioned the county council for a road. But there never seemed to be any money available, the plan was always being shelved. It was not a request that had much priority . . . And so the people began to leave. The school was closed; the telephone kiosk removed; Arnish died.

  ‘But one man is thinking of tomorrow. Four years ago, armed with little more than a wheelbarrow, a pickaxe and a spade, Calum MacLeod began to convert this track into a road. His neighbour gave him a hand. The Department of Agriculture, who own Raasay, sent some men to help him blast past the worst bits. But virtually the whole of this 6,000 feet of road is built by the sweat of his brow. Now it’s nearly finished, they say he ought to get a medal. They’re saying on the island that this homemade highway to Arnish has a better foundation than any other road. Calum’s embankments are built with great skill. You can see that here there’s a craftsman’s hand at work.’

  Derek Cooper’s commentary ran on top of a short colour film of Calum working on the road beyond Tarbert, within sight of Loch Arnish and the far shores of Torran. He is wearing denim jeans and – unusually, for he would normally work in leather footwear – Wellington boots, a navy blue jacket and a Guernsey, and beneath his lighthouse-keeper’s cap his cropped hair is white. Calum first comes into camera-shot pushing his wheelbarrow southwards from Arnish. Inside the barrow are a shovel, a sledgehammer and a pickaxe. He takes off his jacket and drops it on the ground. He picks up the shovel and with it tears a lump of heather and sod from the cliff-face. It is an extremely large piece of earth and vegetation. As he drags it with his pickaxe down from the cliff to the road and drops it ruthlessly over the seaward side, we see that this thick lump of heather and sod is almost the same size and weight as Calum himself. He moves it not without effort, but with a determination that will brook no resistance. The camera lingers on the astonishing dry-stone works that support the flat, dry road.

  Calum then attacks the cliff-face with his pickaxe and brings down a shower of rocks. He sorts through the stones with his bare hands, throwing useless scraps of vegetation over his shoulder and down towards the sea. He picks up four very large chunks of granite and puts them inside the worn, wooden wheelbarrow, which was clearly homemade and is attached to a cast-iron frame and wheel.

  As the camera pans back, the television screen again displays the magnitude and jigsaw-like precision of Calum’s finished holding wall on the seaward side of the road. He wheels the four large rocks a few yards further towards Arnish before tipping them out of the barrow. Then he begins to slot them into place on the landward side of the road. He stoops and handles the heavy ston
es with the agility and strength of a gymnast or a coalminer. He stops to wrench off his right boot and tip a stray pebble from its depths.

  ‘Alongside the stone dykes built by his father and grandfather’, explains Cooper, ‘are the new culverts of Calum’s motor road to Arnish. All this has been done in between working his croft single-handed and serving as a relief lighthouse keeper on Rona. Sixty now, Calum has the energy and determination of a man half his age. When he was younger he won a gold medal for one of his Gaelic essays. He has a feeling for the world about him, for the sea, and the land, and the ancient rocks beneath his feet.’

  Calum MacLeod’s assured, gentle voice then overtakes that of Derek Cooper. ‘The rocks here’, he says, ‘are very interesting indeed. Geologically, it’s a geologist’s paradise. You won’t go a couple of yards when you see different types of rock. Mica, quartz, felspar, fossils and whatnot. And even copper seams have been discovered here.’

  Calum is next seen facing the camera in close-up, with the sea of Loch Arnish and a single house at Torran visible over his right shoulder. He is still wearing his old lighthouse cap. He has a steady, patient expression. He is listening carefully to the question. ‘It’s ironic in a way, isn’t it,’ says Cooper, ‘that you’re building this road right at the end of the life of the community, because virtually everyone has gone from this north end, from Arnish, except yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ replies Calum quickly, ‘but nobody here had a free-hold like me. All the rest, their houses were built at the landlord’s expense. And any improvements they did was simply a compensation on you leaving, depending on the state of your house. If your house was in a poor condition you wouldn’t get a penny.’